On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:03:08 -0500, Jarrett Billingsley wrote:

> "gerryscat" <gerryscat@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:es78lq$aj9$1@digitalmars.com...
>> I've been poking around, sure I see sample code, even a GUI library, great. Now, where is a program, written in D for Windows, that I can download and **run**? The proof is in the pudding (whatever that means).
>>
>> thanks
> 
> Oh come now, any old programming language can produce an executable file. You could write functionally equivalent programs in pretty much any language, but the real question is: which language do you want to program it in?
> 
> Are programmers really going to care what the EXE looks like?  No.  Are availiable EXE files a good indicator of the ability of a language? Absolutely not.  All EXEs are are a measure of how many people are using the language  (Which admittedly is still small with D.  But you have to start somewhere!).


I have to agree with the above.  It's the clear truth.

But I imagine the need to "see" the binary stems from the same sort of psychological factor on which advertising/marketing preys.  It's neither logical nor objective.  But it's very powerful.

This is one reason D will struggle to have any influence on the majority of users as long as it's main marketing is based on language qualities and comparisons: few, beyond language techies, will harken based on D's features and improvements alone. That's why libraries and applications are sometimes the single most important publicity piece (think Ruby on Rails).

Only later do people start to realize the importance of some language features. Even then, most of the features are largely unnecessary or non-critical from the actual project's perspective; people may just grow fond of them for individual reasons.

-JJR

"John Reimer" <terminal.node@gmail.com> wrote in message news:esa5rr$1b3b$1@digitalmars.com...
> I have to agree with the above.  It's the clear truth.
>
> But I imagine the need to "see" the binary stems from the same sort of psychological factor on which advertising/marketing preys.  It's neither logical nor objective.  But it's very powerful.
>
> This is one reason D will struggle to have any influence on the majority
> of
> users as long as it's main marketing is based on language qualities and
> comparisons: few, beyond language techies, will harken based on D's
> features and improvements alone. That's why libraries and applications are
> sometimes the single most important publicity piece (think Ruby on Rails).
>
> Only later do people start to realize the importance of some language features. Even then, most of the features are largely unnecessary or non-critical from the actual project's perspective; people may just grow fond of them for individual reasons.

Good points.  As a fan of languages, it makes me sad to know that this is the truth, though.  Executives are more interesting in hearing about how using a language will "increase their dynamic growth potential" or "effect a scalable Web 2.0 XHTML AJAX paradigm shift" based on how other projects written in the language have done.